Ubuntu: No Screens Found
I didn’t jump on the latest Ubuntu upgrade (Feisty Fawn) when it first came out. I didn’t jump for the same reason I don’t byte on ANY new software as soon as it comes out: Bugs. I want at least the first round of bugs… the serious ones… the ones that will lock up my system or otherwise prevent me from getting work done… FIXED before I risk my productivity with an upgrade.
I figured a month was long enough.
HAhaHahAhAHAhAHahaHA!
The Problem
Using the upgrade option on my desktop, I installed the latest and greatest… only to be greeted with a black screen when I rebooted. Well, the screen wasn’t completely black, there were lines of voodoo hieroglyphics written in ancient hexidecimal, and buried somewhere near the bottom of it all was this: “NO SCREENS FOUND”
What? You mean the screen that my system could “find” perfectly damn well 20 minutes ago? THAT screen?
Yeah, that screen. The new and improved Ubuntu either couldn’t find my monitor, or was so FUBAR that the only thing it could think of to say was that there was no monitor attached.
I hate it when that happens.
The Cause
A bug crawled into the latest Ubuntu release. And died. And rotted because nobody cleaned it up in well over a month. And the stench of its rotting corpse rose to the heavens and choked the gods. To Death.
Really… that’s all there is to say. Something wasn’t tested before it was released and now I’m blind… or I might as well be blind because my window to the world is as black as the devil’s asscrack at midnight. And no, I’m not happy about it.
The Solution
This is (now) a known issue, and there are several things you can do to attempt to fix it. Most of them are discussed at length In this ubuntu forum. I tried several, and the only one that actually worked for me are the steps outlined in in this particular comment. I’ll supply the relevant parts below:
At command line after failure:
- sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
- choose Vesa
- remove all resolutions except 640×480
- set “HorizSync 36-52″ and “VertRefresh 36-60″
- startx
- sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx (or latest from ATI)
- sudo aticonfig –initial
- see to it that /etc/X11/xorg.conf really gets changed after aticonfig
- should be up and running (my native resolution 1680×1050, ATI x1600 on HP nx9420)
In GDM:
After completing step 5 above, I had a functioning upgraded system again, and the remaining steps are done in the GUI. But don’t be fooled… if you are new to Linux, these steps aren’t as intuitive as they seem above. “sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg” brings up a configuration program that has lots and lots of screens. Lots. For most of them, you can just hit enter. For some , I had to hit the escape key and THEN hit enter. I still don’t know why. The important screens (the one where you select “VESA” and the one where you enter your resolution, etc.) are mixed in with the ones you can ignore, which means you pretty much have to read each one to figure out just what the hell you’re supposed to do… if anything. And I was not exactly comfortable with what some of those default values implied… but I was following directions so I let them be. I guess that’s what steps 6-9 are all about… undoing all those ugly-ass defaults.
But anyway, my monitor works now, and this didn’t take nearly as long to fix as I feared. Thirty minutes from Google search to working system. Not bad.
Popularity: 5% [?]